Yasushi Inoue, The Hunting Gun, Trans. by Michael Emmerich. Pushkin Press, 2014.
read it at Google Books
A lover, her daughter and the abandoned wife: three letters by three women tell the story of a love affair's tragic consequences. First Shoko, who finds out about the infidelity through reading her mother's diary; then Midori, the wife who has always known but never told; and finally the beautiful Saiko, the woman who has betrayed her best friend.Yasushi Inoue's poised, unsentimental novella is a powerful tale with universal resonance. Written from three different points of view, the story explores the impact of forbidden passion. Love, death, truth and loneliness are all intertwined in this masterpiece from one of Japan's greatest writers.
The book begins with a framing device that feels old-fashioned yet contemporary in its self-consciousness. The “author” explains that he recently received a mysterious letter from a man named Misugi Josuke, who claims to be the subject of a poem published by the “author.” Josuke thinks the poem captured the “desolate dried-up riverbed” within him. He encloses three letters that came to him, asking that the “author” read and then destroy them. The first, addressed to Uncle Josuke, comes from a woman named Shoko, whose mother, Saiko, has recently died. Saiko divorced Shoko’s father for adultery when Shoko was 5. Josuke and his wife, Midori, have been close family friends for as long as Shoko can remember, and Shoko has always felt a special closeness to gentle Midori. The day before Saiko’s death, Shoko was supposed to burn her mother’s diary, but she read it and was shocked to learn that Saiko and Josuke have been having an affair for 13 years and that Saiko has been wracked with guilt. While thanking Josuke for his support, Shoko tells him she never wants to see him or Midori again. She also sends along a letter Saiko left for him. But the second letter is from Midori, who writes that she wants to end their marriage, which has been a sham all along. While appearing to involve herself with other men, she's always pined for Josuke, who's remained coolly aloof. She knows he thought he was protecting her from knowledge of his affair, but she discloses her own secret: She has always known. Saiko’s letter is a farewell. About to die, she tells Josuke her own guilty, passionate secret, one that Josuke has never suspected. Nor will the reader, although it makes complete sense.
This slight but elegant and moving novella is a lovely introduction to a prolific Japanese writer (1907-1991) largely unknown in the West. - Kirkus Reviews
The Hunting Gun is a short novella presented largely in epistolary form. It begins with the narrator relating how he came to publish a poem called 'The Hunting Gun' in a magazine put out by the Hunters Club of Japan which a friend of his edits. When he sees it in print the author realizes that it's completely inappropriate, what with his imagery of:
the glittering hunting gun,But he doesn't hear anything back about his poem -- good or bad --, and figures: "it was probably never read at all." A few months later, however, he does receive a letter from someone who had read the poem -- and saw himself in it. Calling himself 'Josuke Misugi', the letter-writer then goes on to send the poet three letters he received, presumably in the hopes that they'll explain why he looked the way he did -- with that: "impression of loneliness" -- and which the poet presumably had glimpsed when composing the poem.
Stamping its weight on the lonely body,
Lonely mind of a middle-aged man
The three letters addressed to Misugi were written by a mother, her twenty-year-old daughter, and Misugi's wife. Each can't face him personally -- his wife even addresses him as "Mr. Josuke Misugi" --, but break with him in these letters, written in close proximity; one of the women is a suicide, the other two feel differing betrayals.
Misugi's wife claims:
First of all, you've never had anything to do with loneliness. You've never felt lonesome.But after this, of course, as he finds himself truly (and triply) abandoned, lonesomeness will of course grip him.
One of the women writes:
To love, to be loved -- our actions are pathetic.She recalls first thinking about the difference between being loved and loving when still a teenager, and remembers how practically everyone sought to be loved; in her letter she reflects that perhaps this is, indeed, the lesser of the two -- and cries that:
I am now getting the punishment of a woman who couldn't stand the pain of loving and who sought the happiness of being loved.The poet closes his story with a few words, wondering what Misugi might have taken from these letters, but the condemning -- of Misugi, and of the women who wrote them-- letters largely speak for themselves.
In these three separate short accounts (and the brief framing sections), The Hunting Gun manages to very effectively present the complexities of the passion and relationships at work here, making for a surprisingly rich work. Very effective, quite haunting. - M.A.Orthofer
The Japanese are famous for many things – most good, some weird but always very distinctive. The characteristics that I was reminded of when reading Yasushi Inoue’s classic ‘The Hunting Gun‘ were the love of precision and the national skill of keeping things focused and tightly controlled. This book is like a perfectly arranged single flower, deliberated over by the arranger for hours to eliminate any possibility of imperfection. The brevity of its 74 pages (of which 12 are introduction and commentary) reminded me of the much-loved haiku poetry format where restricted length enforces consideration of every syllable that hits the page. Yes I’m aware that this all sounds ridiculously pretentious but this little book squeezes more emotion into just 62 translated pages than most authors can fit into many hundreds. It is a tiny, precious work of art that lingers in the mind of the reader long after it’s finished. I’m completely captivated by this complex love story, related only after the facts and by a narrator who’s entirely detached from the action. I don’t often use the word ‘extraordinary’ but this time I do in its true sense – The Hunting Gun is truly something way outside the realms of the word ‘ordinary’.
I don’t recall where I got this book or when. I found it tucked amongst fatter and more assertive books when I was clearing my shelves to make space for new books. It bears a price label of $13.50 but I’m sure I didn’t buy it in any dollar-using country. Finding it was like opening a box and revealing something valuable that you forgot you had and hadn’t missed and then wondering how you got along for so long without it.
The Hunting Gun is set in Japan just after the end of the Second World War. It was a harsh and sad time in Japanese history when the once great nation was licking its wounds after defeat and questioning who and what it was and how to rebuild a sense of worth again. However, despite the significance of the time when it was written, for the reader there are few clues that place the story at any particular historic point. It’s a story that could happen anywhere and at any time. It’s a timeless story of forbidden love revealed.
The book opens with the narrator explaining that he’d written a poem for a magazine in which he described a man walking in front of a mountain with his hunting gun over his shoulder. The narrator has no great recollection of what had prompted this story until he receives a letter from a man who claims to be the hunter who has been described. The narrator realises that it was the outward expression of loneliness that drew him to the man. Despite there being no connection between the two men and this being their first contact, the hunter has sent three letters to the narrator, apparently hoping that their content will help his unknown observer to understand the loneliness that he recognised and described. He asks nothing from him other than the time it will take to read the letters.
The letters are from three women who are connected both through family ties and through the hunter. Shoko is the first letter writer and is a 20 year old who has just discovered from her dead mother’s diary that her mother and the hunter were lovers for many years. The second letter is from the hunter’s wife Midori, revealing that she knew all along what was going on, exacting a small revenge and requesting a divorce from her husband – all very politely as you might expect from a Japanese woman. The third and final letter is from Shoko, the mistress who lies dying and reflecting on her role as sinner, liar and lover.
That really all there is to this book. No complex back and forth of letters, no repeated cycles of communication and no sudden revelations of hidden events and emotions. Just three letters – each of them bursting with different emotions and each relating to the same relationship. We know nothing of what happens next and we don’t need to. Like the flower in the vase, adding one more page or one more twig or leaf would spoil what’s already tightly pared down to the minimum required to move the reader.
The edition I have was translated into English in 1961 by Sadamichi Yokoo and Sandford Goldstein and I worried that the act of translation might have lost the differences in the voices of the three women but the translators have done a fantastic job. Each of the women writes so differently that we can deduce a lot about them from the way each letter is written and from all the things we see that don’t need to be explicitly written down. The daughter is angry, cheated of the love of both her mother and Midori by the discovery of her mother’s secret. This anger is mixed with the emotional loss of finding herself without a mother at such an early age. The wife’s letter shows she’s clever, classy, rather polished and a bit vengeful after keeping her secret for 13 years. And finally the dying lover is reflecting sadly on the secret relationship and whether anything will remain after her death. If you took all the pages, mixed them up and then dipped into the pile of papers at random, you would know instantly which woman was writing.
You will probably not find it easy to get a copy of this book. Amazon lists it only in second hand and mostly over-priced editions. If you can get it though, you’ll be in for a treat. This tiny volume packs more punch than most books many times bigger and brasher. For those who don’t like ‘foreign’ books, there’s little that you need to know about Japan or the Japanese that will stop you from understanding a simple tale of three women connected to one man through one forbidden relationship. - www.curiousbookfans.co.uk/2011/fiction-books/6237/the-hunting-gun-yasushi-inoue
Yasushi Inoue, Life of a Counterfeiter. Trans. by Michael Emmerich. Pushkin Press, 2014.
read it at Google Books
A master forger lives in obscurity and disappointment, oppressed by the shadow of the artist whose work he copies.
Unglamorous, unadorned lives such as this form the focus of Yasushi Inoue's tenderly observed, elegantly distilled short stories - two of which are appearing in English for the first time. With a haunting emotional intensity, they offer glimpses of love lost and lives wasted.
These three luminous, compassionate tales showcase the mastery and exquisite talent of one of Japan's most beloved writers.
Life Of A Counterfeiter is the third in Pushkin Press's recent books from Inoue Yasushi, all of which have been translated by Michael Emmerich, although Life Of A Counterfeiter has been previously translated by Leon Picon, this new edition is also accompanied by two stories new in translation, Reeds and Mr Goodall's Gloves, all of these originally appeared in Japan in the 1950's. The shifting focus of perspective in Life of A Counterfeiter is fantastically subtle, the narrator is asked by the family of renowned painter, Onuki Geigaku, to write his biography, having passed away in 1938 the project is postponed by the war's intervention. The narrator is a journalist for an Osaka paper, which puts the narrative a few degrees closer in relation to Inoue's own experiences, whilst on a research trip with Geigaku's son and heir, Takuhiko, visiting the family homes of those who had purchased Geigaku's paintings they discover a discrepancy in the family seal on some of the paintings they view, after a previous reading of Geigaku's diary and a bit of detective work the character of forger Hara Hosen begins to emerge. Once Geigaku's friend, the story shifts from Geigaku to being a side glance biography of Hosen who falls into forging many paintings, passing them off as being that by the hand of Geigaku, the story traces him from forger to amateur dabbler as a firework maker. Life Of A Counterfeiter is a finely conceived piece of distilled portraiture, imbued with a slight melancholy, which casts a glance at the twists of fate, of how one man succeeds and another falls into obscurity, albeit one of a subtle notoriety.
Reeds is a slightly more fragmentary story which subtly examines notions of memory and attachment theory, the story begins with the narrator relating the story of a kidnapped boy and of his father who is trying to locate him, although their true relationship with each other begins to slide into ambiguity when it becomes apparent the child was adopted, this fragmentary opening begins to give way to the narrator's own recollections of instances from his own childhood, one in particular of being very young laying out on a bank next to a lake, of boats moored and of remembering a man and woman being very close to each other, he later acknowledges what they were really doing, and after asking his mother as to the woman's identity the only woman she can surmise it could have been is Aunt Omitsu, who was seen as bringing shame on the family due to her lewd conduct, Mitsu ends up dying prematurely. The story bears some common motifs seen in other of Inoue's stories, of extended families, official and unofficial, a journalist working at an Osaka newspaper, and the mention of Hokuriku. An interesting additional motif to this story is that of the narrator's recollections of playing the card game of matching pairs with his Grandmother, who is not a blood relative, the narrator in a slightly disguised way observes the similarity with individual memory with that of holding a single card without another to match it with, which is the subtle metaphorical master stroke to this at times affecting story.
Mr Goodall's Gloves shares it's central character with Reeds in Grandmother Kano, perhaps the narrator could also be the same, a journalist working for an Osaka newspaper, this time however the location of the story is set in Nagasaki. In some ways it slightly resembles the title story in structure, that in it, set slightly off stage is a renowned artist, a calligrapher - Matsumoto Jun. The narrator arrives in Nagasaki to report on the city in the aftermath of the bomb, staying at an inn the narrator comes across Matsumoto's calligraphy which unlocks memories of Grandmother Kano, a student of Matsumoto, who is at the centre of this story. Some themes that feature in the previous story can be seen by degrees again in Mr Goodall's Gloves, of the distances between official and unofficial family and being seen as an 'unofficial' family member, the feeling that Kano is living a marginalised existence can be felt. These recollections lead to the narrator wandering through the foreigner's cemeteries of the city, and of the narrator discovering the grave of a Goodall which unlocks memories of Kano relating an episode of a grand state occasion, of the obtaining of the gloves, and of a foreigner also called Goodall, the story subtly intertwines these lives and uses a subtle symbolism in the form of Goodall's gloves in representing differing themes and instances to those who encounter them. Set against the possibility of them being the same man and amidst these speculations is the almost ethereal figure of Grandmother Kano, with her unofficial status, these stories subtle probe themes of tangible existences and the possibility of connecting lives, in a way that perhaps could be best described as portraiture within portraiture, a rewarding addition to Inoue in English, many thanks to Pushkin Press. - nihondistractions.blogspot.com/2014/07/life-of-counterfeiter-by-yasushi-inoue.html
Yasushi Inoue, Bullfight. Trans. by Michael Emmerich. Pushkin Press, 2013.
read it at Google Books
Tsugami, the editor-in-chief of a newspaper in war-scarred Osaka, agrees to sponsor a bullfight. For months this great gamble consumes him, makes him as wary and combative as if he was in a ring himself. And, as he becomes ever more distant, his lover Sakiko is unsure if she would like to see him succeed or be destroyed.Yasushi Inoue's novella won him the prestigious Akutagawa Prize and established him as one of Japan's most acclaimed authors. From the planning of a bullfight-through Tsugami's struggle, his focus and his aloneness-he crafts something intensely memorable, a compelling existential tale.
After a few years blogging, and also to aptly mark the recent publication of The Life of A Counterfeiter, the third book by Inoue Yasushi from Pushkin Press, recently read here, it gives me great pleasure to be able to offer readers with my first give away post, a chance to receive and review a copy of Bullfight, the Akutagawa Prize winning story by Inoue Yasushi, translated by Michael Emmerich, via the generosity of Pushkin Press. All you need to do is to leave a comment to register your interest then send me an email, (via my profile), with your postal address and after 10 days, (or there about, apologies - this is the speed I work at!), I'll pop all names into a hat or bag and then pick the name of the lucky recipient, I'm happy to post anywhere on the globe, but obviously there is also the obligatory provision - that once you've read the book you post a review of it on either your own, or your favourite website or blog so that I have somewhere to link on to after the event. So there you go, that's all there is to it, if you'd like the opportunity to win and read this copy of a post war masterpiece leave a comment stating your interest and then drop us an email with a contact address - good luck and all the best. - nihondistractions.blogspot.com/
Set in a wet and somewhat dreary post-war Japan landscape, Bullfight is an existential masterpiece revolving around newspaper editor Tsguami’s misguided obsession with staging a bullfight in war-scarred Osaka.
For months this great gamble consumes him, makes him as wary and combative as if he was in a ring himself. And, as he becomes ever more distant, his lover Sakiko is unsure if she would like to see him succeed or be destroyed.
Yasushi Inoue’s intensely memorable and compellingly dramatic novella won him the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1949 and established him as one of Japan’s most acclaimed authors. Long published in Germany and France, it is now finally available in English for the very first time. In 2014, Bullfight will be followed by more work by Inoue: another novella, the haunting and poetic love-story The Hunting Gun, and a short-story collection, The Counterfeiter.
“His massive œuvre achieves an unmistakable synthesis of tradition and modernity, of Western and Far-Eastern cultures” KulturSPIEGEL
“What is unique about your work … is that each story
presents a vision, and that in reading it I can always follow and
believe in that vision, unlike those in the books of other authors … and
you produce them in the simplest and lightest language that I have ever
encountered” Peter Handke, letter to Inoue, March 1988
Click here to read Inoue’s preface to the 1988 French edition.
Like the brushstrokes of a minimalist painting, Inoue’s spare prose
picks out visual details: “the steam rising from the bodies” of the
duelling bulls; a deserted factory resembling “a shipwrecked boat with
its steel beams jutting up into the sky”; a road like a “gash in the
burned-out ruins”. But if Inoue captures the desolate urban landscapes
of 1940s Japan, his real interest lies deeper, in the effects of war on
the national psyche.
With a mixture of empathy and ironic detachment, Inoue examines his protagonist’s motivation in staging the bullfight. At times he suggests that Tsugami wants simply to boost the morale of a beaten populace – “in these postwar days, perhaps [a bullfight] was just the sort of thing the Japanese needed if they were going to keep struggling through their lives”. At others, Tsugami’s obsession with the project seems a mystery even to himself: he is driven by a “feeling he could not define”. As in Akira Kurosawa’s films of the same period – Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray Dog (1949) – a straightforward depiction of urban life expands into a rich, philosophical exploration of human agency and choice.
Bullfight won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, and gave impetus to the author’s prolific career. Pushkin Press has performed a valuable service in making this great work available in English. - David Evans
With a mixture of empathy and ironic detachment, Inoue examines his protagonist’s motivation in staging the bullfight. At times he suggests that Tsugami wants simply to boost the morale of a beaten populace – “in these postwar days, perhaps [a bullfight] was just the sort of thing the Japanese needed if they were going to keep struggling through their lives”. At others, Tsugami’s obsession with the project seems a mystery even to himself: he is driven by a “feeling he could not define”. As in Akira Kurosawa’s films of the same period – Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray Dog (1949) – a straightforward depiction of urban life expands into a rich, philosophical exploration of human agency and choice.
Bullfight won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, and gave impetus to the author’s prolific career. Pushkin Press has performed a valuable service in making this great work available in English. - David Evans
The premise of Yasushi Inoue’s debut novella Bullfight, celebrated in Japan as a classic of postwar literature, is unassuming enough: an evening newspaper sponsors a tournament of the regional sport of bull-sumo. As practical and financial issues arise, the paper’s young editor-in-chief, Tsugami, soon realizes he has taken on more than he can handle, and the spectacle of the bullfight itself becomes a catalyst for Tsugami’s struggle with what his lover, Sakiko, calls his “unsavory side.” Like much of the best Japanese fiction of its era, Bullfight is a marvel of compression. Its 124 pages form a subtly crafted microcosm of a nation coming to terms with the legacy of war.
While the novella is not about World War II, the specter of recent devastation provides Bullfight with its context—this is not a story which could take place just anywhere, or at just any time. Inoue’s Japan is mottled with the effects of violence, sticky and indelible as inked fingerprints. Tsugami was separated from his wife and children when he sent them from Osaka to Tottori to escape the bombings, while Sakiko’s husband was killed in combat. Their relationship itself occurred as a result of violence, and the tremors of the circumstances of its beginnings can still be felt in the lasting ambivalence of the couple’s feelings for each other. Scenery is described in terms of destruction—Tsugami’s office building is noted as having “survived the firebombings”; a road is described “like a gash in the burned-out ruins.” Tsugami’s reasoning behind taking on the project of the bullfight is that he hopes it will distract people. “In these postwar days,” he thinks, “perhaps this was just the sort of thing the Japanese needed if they were going to keep struggling through their lives.”
The novella opens with a conversation between Tsugami and Tashiro, the “country showman” who convinced the paper to take on sponsorship for the bullfight about a month earlier. At the time, Tsugami had never heard of bull-sumo, a regional sport from the small city of Iyo with no history in the rest of Japan, and was not initially taken with either the idea or Tashiro himself. Indeed, he only agrees to meet with Tashiro in order to avoid Sakiko, whose “stubborn silence could be read as expressing either love or hatred.” Tsugami listens to Tashiro with deliberate indifference, but becomes interested upon hearing that spectators typically bet on the outcome of the fights. It is this feeling of gambling, of risk, that Tsugami feels could have the power to rejuvenate the Japanese people. However, his motives are not so straightforward as all that. As the bullfight proves to be a major gamble for Tsugami personally, he becomes obsessed with the undertaking to the point of recklessness, driven by a “rebellious urge.” What is noteworthy here is not that Tsugami’s desire to boost Japanese morale conflicts with or contradicts his selfish desire to throw himself into something, but that the two are in fact the same. One gets the feeling of Tsugami as a sort of postwar Japanese everyman, an intelligent and sensible person overcome by desperation and a need to prove himself.
Still, if Tsugami is a Japanese everyman, he is a distinctly new breed as such. His newspaper, the Osaka New Evening Post targets urban-dwelling intellectuals and emphasizes “satire, irony, and wit in every aspect of its reportage.” It is described as having “a certain shadow of emptiness, of devil-may-care negligence, of loneliness”—a sharp break from the “oafish wartime papers” Japanese readers had been accustomed to. The New Evening Post reflects Tsugami’s personality directly as its editor-in-chief. At thirty-seven, he occupies a sort of middle ground among the living generations of Japanese adults, and finds himself unable to trust either the younger or older generations. The older Okabe, a contact of Tashiro’s that the paper must rely on for further financial backing for the tournament, is viewed with suspicion by Tsugami—and rightly so, as Okabe ends up using the transport of feed for the bulls as a cover for his dealings in the black market—but Tsugami is left with no choice but to rely on him. On the other hand, he is annoyed by the confident nonchalance of the younger Miura to the point of risking everything rather than accept his help.
Every aspect of Bullfight is fraught with this kind of ambivalent tension, but it is perhaps most clear in Tsugami’s relationship with Sakiko. Their affair begins during the war a year after her husband’s death, when she walks in on Tsugami in a private moment and sees in him “the attitude of a man who just doesn’t care anymore.” Sakiko is both attracted to and repulsed by the fundamental coldness she senses in Tsugami, and while she often threatens to leave him, time and again she finds herself unable to, always wavering between desire and “a wish to see him destroyed.” As for his part, Tsugami appears, at times, disturbingly indifferent to Sakiko, and uses his involvement with the tournament to distance himself from her temporarily. Frustrated by this, she comes to see him at work in the stadium one day, and mocks his idea for a fireworks show, suggesting that a big chrysanthemum would look lovely “blooming over the charred rubble of Osaka.” The chrysanthemum is of course the emblem of imperial Japan—with this remark she derides not only Tsugami’s enthusiasm for the tournament, but the very project of revitalizing Japan.
While the tournament itself is more or less clearly a metaphor for Japan’s struggle to rebuild, Inoue is never heavy-handed. No secret is made of the characters’ “unsavory sides,” but there is never any moralizing. There is a sense of dignity in the stillness of Inoue’s narrative voice, and this dignity extends to the presentation of the characters themselves as they do what they can to get ahead. While Bullfight is indeed about a tournament, about a relationship, about a nation, it is ultimately about people—three-dimensional and flawed.
Written in spare, clean prose, and excellently translated by Michael Emmerich, Bullfight is a powerful, accessible read. Though Inoue was awarded the coveted Akutagawa Prize in 1949 for Bullfight and went on to write fifty novels, his work has not gained the Western following of many of his contemporaries. Pushkin’s edition is not only a beautifully produced physical object in itself, but an important and long-overdue introduction of a masterful writer to the anglosphere. With another title forthcoming from Pushkin this year, we may all hope to see Inoue’s work achieve the global readership it so richly deserves. - Ariel Starling
Review by David Pilling
Genius of a Japanese master: Life of a Counterfeiter and The Hunting Gun
Yasushi Inoue, Tun-huan. Trans. by Jean Oda Moy, NYRB Classsics, 2010.
More than a thousand years ago, an extraordinary trove of early Buddhist sutras and other scriptures was secreted away in caves near the Silk Road city of Tun-huang. But who hid this magnificent treasure and why? In Tun-huang, the great modern Japanese novelist Yasushi Inoue tells the story of Chao Hsing-te, a young Chinese man whose accidental failure to take the all-important exam that will qualify him as a high government official leads to a chance encounter that draws him farther and farther into the wild and contested lands west of the Chinese Empire. Here he finds love, distinguishes himself in battle, and ultimately devotes himself to the strange task of depositing the scrolls in the caves where, many centuries later, they will be rediscovered. A book of magically vivid scenes, fierce passions, and astonishing adventures, Tun-huang is also a profound and stirring meditation on the mystery of history and the hidden presence of the past.
The unique thing about Inoue’s work, for me … is that every story presents a vision, and that unlike the visions in books by other authors, I can always follow the vision as I’m reading, always believe it; Inoue has lived and felt these images and has the simplest and airiest language for them that I have ever seen. I don’t need to first believe his illuminations, they are simply there in the book, as facts.
—Peter Handke
A work of superb historical imagination… —James Kirkup
Early in the 20th century an incredible hoard of Buddhist sutras and other manuscripts was discovered by itinerant monk in Tun-huang. Archaeologists recovered thousands of documents that have been concealed in the Thousand Buddha Caves for 900 years. The author…speculated on the reasons for the hiding of such treasures, and this fascinating and exotic novel is the result.
—Publishers Weekly
Historical reconstruction of a very personal and special kind. —Donald Richie
Yasushi Inoue did not make his debut in literature until 1949 at the age of forty-two. He did so with the two short novels Bullfight and The Hunting Gun;
the former won him the prestigious Akutagawa Prize—the Japanese
equivalent of the Pulitzer—and he went on to write over fifty novels and
win every major Japanese literary prize, including the Order of
Culture, Japan’s highest artistic honor, in 1976. It seems safe to say
that Inoue was worth the wait.
His reputation in the west has
similarly been a long time coming. Pushkin’s editions are not the first
of his work to appear in English (The Hunting Gun in particular
was released in another translation by Tuttle in 2001), but despite
occupying the upper echelons of postwar writers in Japan, he has not yet
achieved the western readership of his Nobel-Prize-winning and
-nominated contemporaries Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima. Inoue is
best known in Japan for his historical fiction, which may hold less
interest for a western audience unfamiliar with tenth-century East Asian
goings-on; still, the matter may best be chalked up to the fact that
literary renown, particularly for literature in translation, is a
strange beast. Whatever the cause, it has nothing to do with Inoue’s
caliber as a writer. (Mishima, after all, was never awarded the Order of
Culture.)Inoue worked as an arts reporter in Osaka after his university years, and his experience as a journalist served him well as a novelist. Though in the afterword to The Hunting Gun he refers to the novel as the work “of a very green novelist,” one has to wonder where the “youthful ungainliness” he describes is to be found in its pages. His debut is written with the remarkable economy, sensitivity, and detail of an old master. There is no clumsiness here, no thread left loose, no veering into melodrama despite the unabashed tragedy of its subject matter. The novel is at all times subtle and distilled, and contains more emotion in its 106 pages than a lesser or truly “green” writer could muster in several times that length.
Set in the years immediately following World War II and framed as a series of letters, The Hunting Gun concisely and elegantly explores the distance between individuals in intimate relationships, the ways in which disparate lives intersect, and the relationship between fiction and reality. The novel opens with a brief introduction by the unnamed narrator, into whose possession the letters comprising the main story have come. A minor poet, the narrator is invited by an old high school acquaintance to contribute a piece to the magazine The Hunter's Friend, of which he is the editor. It is assumed that the invitation is extended out of courtesy, and the narrator himself has no interest in hunting. However, “as chance would have it,” he has recently taken interest in the idea of the hunting gun as a symbol of violence and human solitude, and he accepts. The resulting prose poem describes a lone figure carrying a Churchill double-barrel shotgun plodding his way through the snow up Mount Amagi, pipe in mouth, with a setter ahead. Some months later he receives a letter from one Misugi Jōsuke, a man who believes he is the figure described in the poem. Though he claims to never have read poetry in his life, Misugi explains that he is honored to have inspired the piece and impressed by the poet's insight into his state of mind at the time, having only seen him from afar. Misugi tells the narrator he will send three letters his way rather than burning them. He insists these letters will help the narrator to better understand him—and “humans are, in the end, stupid creatures who cannot help desiring that someone know us as we are.” By beginning the novel with an explicit explanation of the hunting gun’s symbolism, Inoue deftly sets the tone of The Hunting Gun and binds the subsequent letters to this symbolized view of human nature: isolated, brutal, and desperate above all else to be known.
Following the ten-page-long introduction, the story moves from the narrator to the three women of Misugi’s letters: Shōko, his niece; Midori, his wife; and Saiko, his recently deceased lover and sister-in-law. Each account provides a different perspective on Misugi’s infidelity and character. To draw an obvious comparison, the technique is reminiscent of Rashōmon—what is unique here is that the events themselves never change, only their interpretations. Though Shōko’s youthful ideals of love and relationships have been deeply shaken by the revelation of Misugi’s affair with her mother, she remains sympathetic and naïve, seeing him as noble in his suffering for a secret and forbidden love. “How could I have imagined,” she writes, “a love that stretched out secretly, like an underground channel deep under the earth, flowing from who knew where to who know where without ever feeling the sun’s rays?” Not being immediately implicated in the affair herself, Shōko views the triangle which has long eroded her family with the distance of an intimate bystander. Learning of the illicit relationship between Misugi and her mother only by reading her mother’s diary shortly before her death, her character demonstrates how even the most private actions between individuals are rarely truly private. Sin, Shōko learns, can be inherited.
Midori and Saiko’s views of Misugi are less forgiving. Midori in particular describes him as “not a man to make a woman happy . . . completely devoid of an endearingly human side,” though she is soon revealed as a complexly flawed character, and not just a stock image of the long-suffering wife betrayed. Saiko as well is acutely aware of what she calls Misugi’s “wicked” side, and is tormented by its contrast to the undeniable purity of their love. She fixates on this dissonance as a sin, repeating the phrase in her diary—“SIN, SIN, SIN.” Though each woman holds a distinct view of Misugi’s character, in sending the correspondence from all three to the poet narrator in order to explain himself he acknowledges the equal validity of each perspective. The marks one leaves on those around him may reveal more than a person could ever reveal about himself. The reader is thus given a multifaceted portrait of a man without ever hearing more than a few lines from him directly. Shōko's idea of Misugi in particular has little to do with that of the adult women’s—the notion of sin is the only constant.
Inoue’s use of the word “sin” here is telling. Though the Japanese zaiyaku (罪悪) lacks the religious resonance of the English sin, the novel is dotted throughout with Christian imagery. A petal, for example, is “crucified” in glass; Saiko recalls Misugi saying that every person has a devilish snake within him. This motif is notable not only for its religious implication of man as inherently flawed, but also for its being decidedly western. There are other instances of western imagery as well, such as the repetition of SIN in Saiko’s diary “piled as high as the Eiffel Tower” and the English hunting gun itself. Inoue’s decision to describe the human heart in terms of western—indeed, foreign—symbols turns the heart itself into something foreign and, to his original Japanese readers, ultimately unknowable.
While neither so dark nor tragic in tone as The Hunting Gun, the three short stories which comprise Life of a Counterfeiter exhibit a similar treatment of human nature and the lives of others. The title story follows the findings of an arts reporter as he reluctantly undertakes the writing of the painter Ōnuki Keigaku’s biography. Asked to pursue the project before the war and having found the work to be more difficult than anticipated, he allows his research to be delayed for a decade until he can put it off no further—it is at this point that he finds himself fascinated by the figure not of the great painter, but of his counterfeiter.
The narrator’s interest in the counterfeiter is sparked while reading Keigaku’s diary from between the years of 1897 to 1899. Apart from the war and his own personal distractions, the biggest obstacle to working on the autobiography had been the fact that Keigaku was a “prickly” man who never seemed to have any close relationships except for his deceased wife. However, in the diary Keigaku wrote often of a man named Shinozaki—the only name in his diary not that of a family member. The narrator soon realizes this Shinozaki can be none other than the given name of the counterfeiter Hara Hōsen, whose name first came to his attention some years earlier. Though he did not make much of the counterfeiter at the time, the knowledge that this ill-reputed figure known to have led a “dark, unhappy life” was also apparently the only friend of the great painter whose work he forged moves him deeply.
Though Hōsen’s fakeries are skillfully executed, all lack the “innate quality” of Keigaku’s originals—a fine painter, but without genius. One man who knew him as an art dealer describes his impression of him as a man who was “good at everything,” and the narrator finds him to have been remarkably clever in his dealings, moving around frequently without ever straying far from the concentration of Keigaku collectors in the Chūgoku region of Honshū. It soon also becomes clear that he was a man of many talents, not only producing the forged paintings himself but also skilled in calligraphy and carving. Spotting a Hōsen original in an inn and finding in it a quality of exquisite coldness, the question is raised: why would an accomplished person turn to making his living by forgery? Or more precisely, why specialize in the forgery of a friend’s work? While these questions are never quite answered definitively, upon reflecting on the number of Hōsen’s Keigaku forgeries which will likely be handed down within families through generations, the narrator feels as though he is “in the presence of something eternal.” The truth here becomes malleable and nearly immaterial. Fake or no, things of beauty endure. Throughout the story, little more of consequence is revealed about Keigaku, and it is unclear whether the journalist ever completes his biography. While in life Hōsen was overtaken by the greatness of Keigaku, in art it is the figure of the lonely counterfeiter which overtakes that of the respected painter.
The title story takes up over half the collection’s pages, and is far and away the most fully realized of the triad. Still, the two stories which follow are lovely in their own right and give us some insight into Inoue’s flexibility as a writer. Semi-autobiographical and loosely structured, “Reeds” and “Mr. Goodall’s Gloves” both deal largely in the narrator’s childhood memories of his “grandmother” Kano, a former geisha and the mistress of his great-grandfather. Fact and fiction blend seamlessly here—Inoue himself was raised by his great-grandfather’s mistress, named Kano, from ages six to thirteen. These stories do not read as memoir and are certainly not personal essays, but their effortless absence of narrative arc also distinguishes them somewhat from the traditional short story. In any case, if analysis of Inoue’s work thus far is to be any indicator of how his writing should be approached, the literal truth of the stories is without much import.
“Reeds” in particular meanders freely with the recollections of its narrator. Beginning with an anecdote from a newspaper article about a kidnapped child found years later living in a temple, the narrator imagines the fragments of the boy's early memories as an incomplete hand of cards in a game of picture-matching (hanafuda, a Japanese card game in which each suit forms a set of related images, which are matched for points). Inspired by this idea, he reflects that while this boy is something of an extreme example of missing cards, all people have within them an incomplete deck of memories. Sorting through his own scattered recollections, among the most poignant images to emerge is the figure of Kano—a resilient woman, peaceful in the solitude of old age, sitting on the beach in her hometown.
Her character is further developed in “Mr. Goodall’s Gloves,” in which we learn the details of how the narrator came into her care as well as her struggles as a young mistress in the conservative Meiji era. Kano at first appears rather unscrupulous, taking in the boy in order to bolster her position in the family after the death of his great-grandfather. The narrator even goes so far as to define himself during these years as her “hostage.” However, the tone soon softens as he describes her harsh beauty and the affection of their early relationship. The story revolves, rather self-evidently, around a pair of gloves which once belonged to a foreigner named Mr. Goodall. As a child, the narrator discovers the gloves wrapped in newspaper while cleaning his grandmother’s home and is immediately fascinated by them, a symbol of luxury and things western. Kano met Mr. Goodall only once, and withholds the story from the narrator until near the end of her life. Taking pity on the young woman forced to wait outside an event for her lover on account of not being his proper wife, Mr. Goodall offers her his gloves. That is all—the narrator himself remarks that it is not too much of a story. Still, this small act of kindness is indelible on Kano, as expressed in her affectionate preservation of the gloves through the decades, and this impact is transferred from her to her surrogate grandson. Inoue again illustrates the uncanny intertwining of individual lives.
The Hunting Gun and Life of a Counterfeiter complement each other nicely as a pair. Delicate and powerful on their own, taken together the two works form a haunting, sensitive meditation on memory as well as a wonderful introduction to a master sorely underappreciated in the West. While Michael Emmerich’s translations might benefit from the addition of footnotes in a few select places (a brief reference to Okakura Tenshin in “Reeds,” for example), he brings Inoue into a fine English—it is difficult to imagine that any nuance has been lost here. If renown in translation is a strange beast, one may hope it is finally rearing its head for Inoue. - Ariel Starling
Yasushi Inoue was one of the most popular and critically acclaimed Japanese writers of the twentieth century—winner of every major Japanese prize, a perennial Nobel candidate, his books made into movies for more than half a century and widely translated. Certainly no Japanese writer between Natsume Soseki and Haruki Murakami, in my view, including Japan’s two excellent Nobel prize winners, gives such intense and consistent literary pleasure. In English, though, he has never even attained the status of being “rediscovered” every decade or two. A university press published a retranslation of The Blue Wolf, Inoue’s novel about Genghis Khan that was the basis for the recent blockbuster movie Genghis, in 2007, and before that was The Samurai Banner of Furin Kazan (basis for a 1969 movie starring Toshiro Mifune) in an almost unreadable translation in 2005—that’s been pretty much it in recent years.
His Internet presence in English is minimal too, though it does reveal how much more of his work has been translated into other European languages. One happily hunts through what there is and pieces together what one can. The English translation of Inoue’s autobiographical novel Shirobamba is only the first half of the original, but the second half exists in French, as Kôsaku; the novella that launched his career, The Bullfight, is untranslated in English but available in French and German. One translator’s introduction says that Inoue went to the United States in 1964 to research “what he personally believes will be his magnum opus, a multi-volume treatment of first, second, and third generation Japanese abroad, particularly in the United States,” then a preface mentions traveling to San Francisco in 1964 to do research for a novel called The Ocean (Wadatsumi); a 1975 introduction says that Inoue “is currently working on Wadatsumi, a historical novel of epic proportions”; and the note in a 1985 anthology at last mentions “Wadatsumi (God of the sea, 1977), a detailed study of Japanese emigration to the United States”—so he finished it, and there the trail grows cold, for now.[1]
I mention this amateur’s—lover’s—treasure hunt because its delights are Inoue-ish delights, present in the books themselves. The main character of A Voice in the Night is an amateur expert on the poems from the eighth-century anthology Manyoshu; in “death, love, and the waves,” the main character brings the thirteenth-century Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, in the English translation from 1900, to finish reading before the suicide he has planned. The Roof Tile of Tempyō, like Tun-huang though set a few centuries earlier, has beautiful descriptions of monks who copy out Buddhist scriptures. In Black Tide, a retired schoolteacher has spent his life writing a cultural history of color in Japan, rediscovering and re-creating the old materials and methods so as to bring to life the colors of the past as they really looked:
to understand the ancient Japanese people’s spiritual and psychological relationship to color—in the broadest sense, to understand the inner lives of the men and women of the past and the social mentality of the time—it was absolutely essential to have a concrete sense of the ancient colors, and there was obviously only one way to do it: manufacture once again the hues of the old colors using the dyeing techniques of the past.After some forty years of work, the schoolteacher has finished his studies and dyed enough silk to tip swatches of all the colors—including the legendary, forbidden hajizome, “like the rays of the sun as it crosses the meridian”—into five hundred copies of his three-volume work, if he can get it printed in the tight postwar years.[2] Inoue himself as a historical novelist is well-known for his thorough research—he is said to have climbed Mount Hodaka four times to gather material for his novel about mountain climbing, The Ice Wall. In the author’s preface in the novel, he describes his five years of researching Tun-huang as “a very satisfying time.”
Yasushi Inoue, the oldest son of an army medical officer, was born in 1907 in northern Japan but grew up on the Izu peninsula on the southern coast, the bucolic setting of many of his stories. He was raised by his “grandmother” Kano, in a separate house from his parents—in fact, Kano was his mother’s grandfather’s mistress, and the old man had arranged for Kano to adopt his oldest granddaughter, Inoue’s mother, so that Inoue’s mother would have to look after the former mistress in her old age. It was a formidable tangle of resentments and split allegiances that Inoue grew up in, living with a proud but affectionate old woman a few blocks away from the house where his blood relatives lived: mother and father, when his father was not posted elsewhere; “real” maternal grandparents, who despised the interloper from the pleasure quarters; and aunts and uncles, Inoue’s mother’s much younger siblings, including some as young as Inoue himself. Whether because his parents traveled, because Kano needed him for her own power struggle, or because Inoue’s mother couldn’t raise two young children without help after the birth of Inoue’s sister, he was “temporarily” sent to live with Kano, who was nevertheless his main emotional support, much more than the parents who resented her and had seemingly abandoned him. His feelings of longing and rejection, ability to understand mixed emotional motives, and tendency to turn to nature for solace all date from those years and are grippingly dramatized in Shirobamba and his other stories of childhood. In one story, “Reeds,” Inoue relates a memory of himself at age five or six, with Kano at a fishing village on the Izu peninsula. They are sitting on a beach and looking at a festive boat while waiting for someone to appear. Inoue doesn’t remember why Kano has brought him here, or who it is they are waiting for, but there they are: “if I have not forgotten the scene to this day, it must be because this image, in which I myself play a part, has something luminous and peaceful about it, but also something strangely empty.”[3]
Inoue excelled at judo and wrote poetry, graduated from Kyoto university in 1936 with a degree in aesthetics and a thesis on Valéry, and except for a stint in the army for a few months in 1937–38, “most of it marching with pack horses about the plains of north China,”[4] he worked as a reporter for the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper in Osaka until 1951. His career as a fiction writer began late and meteorically, in his early forties, when The Bullfight won Japan’s most prestigious writing award, the Akutagawa prize, in 1949, and his masterpiece The Hunting Gun was published almost simultaneously. He retired from the newspaper to pursue writing full-time, and by his death in 1991 he had published some fifty novels and novellas and close to two hundred stories.
Although he is often described as a historical novelist, his work falls into three or four main categories. The historical fiction translated into English includes Tun-huang; The Roof Tile of Tempyō; The Blue Wolf; Wind and Waves, a novel about Kublai Khan’s invasion of Korea; Confucius; Flood; and Loulan, a book of short stories. His second type of fiction is contemporary love stories, preeminently The Hunting Gun, an exquisite book showcasing one of Inoue’s great strengths—his remarkably sympathetic, complex, and true female characters. The Hunting Gun is everything the ultimately disappointing Akutagawa story “In a Grove” (the basis of Rashomon) is supposed to be: a love story with multiple narrators where each narrative dramatically reshapes our understanding of the rest. Inoue’s third type of story addresses the social and political aspects of postwar Japanese society, often with reporter protagonists much like Inoue himself before his retirement: these books—Black Tide, The Bullfight, The Ice Wall, and later reflections on postwar social changes, A Voice in the Night and Mister Ushioda’s Sundays—have tended not to be translated into English. Lastly, there are Inoue’s personal writings: a novel of childhood, Shirobamba (and Kôsaku); a book of childhood stories, Nuages garance (The Clouds Dyed Red); and a moving nonfictional account of his mother’s descent into old age and dementia, Chronicle of My Mother. There are crossovers between these categories—The Ice Wall, for instance, is based on a real-life mountaineering accident and the resulting scandal involving an important company’s controversial new product, nylon rope, but it is also an intense double love triangle—and they have certainly been modified in my own mind with each new book I come across. A Voice in the Night rails against modern life, which gives Inoue’s historical writing a more escapist tinge; the third and weakest story in The Counterfeiter and Other Stories, about contemporary Japanese businessmen, reveals its place in his oeuvre only after Black Tide and The Ice Wall; if I ever get to read The Ocean or God of the Sea, I am sure my sense of his work will be reshaped again.
Still, it is probably safe to say that his historical works are central to Inoue’s art. They are certainly unique among historical fiction. Inoue has a wonderful eye for the historical detail as striking image: “The fifty men . . . banded together with drawn swords and entered the city. inside was a pond full of clear water and two horses standing by its edge, but not a single human being was in sight”; “it was the time of the year when the white grass used for camel fodder grew abundantly”; “it snowed for four days in January, six days in February, and three days in March” (all these examples are from Tun-huang). When the main character of Tun-huang looks over the Hsi-Hsia–Chinese dictionary he had compiled, “several words . . . leapt to his eye: thunder, sunlight, sweet dew, whirlwind.” More important, Inoue’s books feel lived from within, not described from without, despite the scrupulous research. No less an image-maker and prose magician than Peter Handke, who has no patience for most historical fiction, wrote in an open letter to Inoue that
The unique thing about your work, for me—and the books of yours I feel closest to are The Roof Tile of Tempyō and Tun-huang—is that every story presents a vision, and that unlike the visions in books by other authors, I can always follow the vision as I’m reading, always believe it; you have lived and felt these images and have the simplest and airiest language for them that I have ever seen. I don’t need to first believe your illuminations, they are simply there in the book, as facts.[5]One short story with an especially virtuosic example of Inoue’s conjuring power is “under the shadow of Mt. Bandai,”[6] about a volcanic eruption in 1888 that destroyed the surrounding villages and created a lake district in their place. It uses the only first-person narrator I know of in Inoue’s historical fiction, a tax collector visiting and inspecting the villages on the mountain, and at one point he describes the following:
Around ten o’clock we reached the village of Hosono. I call it a village though it consisted of no more than seven households. They were nice, sturdy houses clustered together on a narrow piece of land closed in on the east and west by the peaks of Hachimori and Tsurugigamine. The encroaching hills seemed to crowd into the village on both sides. This was truly a mountain hamlet. The main work of the men there was logging, and each of the houses had a small shed attached which looked something like a chicken coop. Here the family kept a wood lathe or two. The farming was left to the women, and when we arrived at the village there was no sign of them because they were all out in the fields.It is the most basic description one could imagine of things simply seen, though impressive upon closer inspection for its encapsulated social history and personal touches (the houses “nice,” the surrounding hills that “seemed to crowd into the village”). At the end of the story, the narrator says: “Though I have related this story in some detail, the fact is that I have never gone back to visit the area” after the eruption, “and it is unlikely that I ever shall.” But of course 1888 was before Inoue was born, and it was always impossible for Inoue to see what the story describes, which since 1888 has been at the bottom of a lake. And yet everything about the village of Hosono is “simply there in the book, as facts.” The presence of a first-person narrator turns the story into a sort of invisible manifesto of Inoue’s own art of bringing the past to life: the past that is always under water and volcanic ash, always somewhere we will never return.
Tun-huang (1959) is perhaps Inoue’s greatest novel in his greatest genre. The NYRB edition reprints in the very fine 1978 translation by Jean Oda Moy (also the translator of Inoue’s most personal books in English, Shirobamba and Chronicle of My Mother), which has aged well except for the vexed matter of Chinese proper names: she used, of course, the older transliteration system, which may add to the confusion of any readers already familiar with Dunhuang (Tun-huang), the western Xia kingdom or Xi-Xia (Hsi-Hsia), etc.
Tun-huang has been an important city for millennia, on the Chinese end of the silk road, and the nearby Mogao Grottoes or Thousand Buddha Caves, filled with statues, paintings, frescoes, and inscriptions dating back to the fourth through fourteenth centuries, are one of the greatest art sites in the world. The cave now prosaically known as Cave 17 kept its secrets for close to nine centuries—from around 1036, when an incomparable storehouse of books and documents was sealed up inside for reasons that have never been determined, until 1907, when a Hungarian-British archaeologist, Marc Aurel Stein, learned about the library’s existence from a Chinese Taoist priest who had stumbled upon the cave a few years before. The library was of incalculable historical, religious, and cultural importance— containing, to name just one example, the world’s earliest known printed book, a diamond sutra scroll sixteen feet long with the precise date of printing on the colophon: May 11, 868—and for nearly twenty years a series of European, Japanese, and American scholar-adventurers negotiated with (or cheated) the priest to recover (or steal) thousands upon thousands of artifacts. The best telling of this unbelievable story is still Peter Hopkirk’s swashbuckling book from 1980, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road; the best reconstruction of the 11th-century events is Inoue’s novel.
No further historical background is needed to enjoy Tun-huang, since the book itself and Inoue’s preface give all the necessary information and the history they present is substantially accurate by the standards of today’s scholarship. It is true that sources other than the official Chinese histories would be less inclined to call all non-Chinese peoples “tribes,” or refer to Yüan-hao conquering a few large prefectures in what is now northwest China as “conquering Central Asia”; it may also be worth noting that the Uighurs mentioned in the book were not the same as the Uighur people of today, though some of them may have been the ancestors of today’s Uighurs. The Islamization of Central Asia had proceeded west of the Pamirs, and east of them only in the great oasis cities of Kashgar and Khotan at the western end of the Tarim basin, thus Inoue is mistaken when he writes that “the Muslims” invaded the Tun-huang area from the west—Khotan was growing into an important power, but its political ambitions in that period lay westward, not east toward China. Such quibbles aside, Inoue’s historical narrative is perfectly reliable.[7]
It is also enchanting fiction, and I encourage anyone who has not yet read the novel to skip the rest of this essay and fall under its spell for yourself. It opens in a classic mold— young hero from the provinces shows up to make his name in the capital—when suddenly he falls asleep in the sun. His dream is a clever way for Inoue to give the necessary exposition, and when the hero wakes up it is a different book—a novel’s dream-world. Hsing-te is no longer strong and super-competent, as he is said to be before his exams, but physically weak and psychologically adrift. The battle scenes exemplify his new life: he slings the stones he has and then faints, tied to his horse, leaving the rest to fate. Like Stendhal, Inoue uses war not as a canvas for the hero’s expression of purposeful, heroic free will but to show how larger forces utterly overwhelm our puny claims to individual choice and meaning. Unlike Stendhal, though, Inoue doesn’t seem to see a conflict between greater forces and human action: Hsing-te feels carried along by fate, and at several key moments in the book he changes his mind for no reason, in a way that makes him seem absolutely real. Near the end, wondering why his life had turned out the way it did, “he could think of no undue pressures on him, nor any strong influence other than his own free choice. Just as water flows from higher to lower levels, he, too, had merely followed the natural course of events. . . . If he could relive his life, he would probably travel the same route given the same circumstances.” The textbook metaphor of determinism is here an image of perfectly free meandering, not opposed to personal choice.
The luminous, gentle tone of these passages is central to Inoue’s art. Leon Picon, in his 1965 introduction to The Counterfeiter and Other Stories, says that “human pathos and suffering, loneliness and isolation, oriental fatalism and Buddhistic concepts of predestination form dominant strands in the fabric of virtually all of the writing of Yasushi Inoue,” and while I can’t exactly disagree, I am certainly dissatisfied with the dated cliches, and suspicious of the capitalized Orientalisms on display here. The note in The Sh̄wa Anthology is surely closer to the center of the truth, characterizing Inoue’s work as “the examination of the faintest ripples of cultural interchange between Japan and the outside world, ripples often created by lonely individuals who remain essentially nameless and faceless in the annals of official history.” I would say—aware that my own reflections will no doubt seem time bound and off-key in a few decades, not to mention the centuries that are Inoue’s usual time scale—that Inoue’s great theme, spanning his historical, contemporary, and autobiographical works, is how the life you lead is not your real life. What we think of as our personal struggles—our decisions, desires, deliberations, the choices we make and the things we do—are less real, less to be trusted, and perhaps ultimately less important than the wider forces of historical destiny or the cultural past or the way we started to feel as a child, or simply the fact that other people are not who we think they are, and nor are we.
The challenge of any historical fiction—especially a book structured like this one, leading up to an important historical event that readers know about before they begin—is how to make the story nonetheless feel like life. (If there is anything essential to the experience of living your life, it is that you don’t know what will happen next.) Near the end of the book, transporting the library of scrolls to the cave, Hsing-te looks at “the sight of sixty large [camels], each loaded down with scrolls and documents, advancing across the moon-bathed desert,” and finds “something moving” about the vision, though he “could not define why it was so. he wondered whether it might be that he had been wandering around the frontier regions for years just for this night.” In a certain literal sense, he’s right: Inoue did build a whole book of Hsing-te’s wanderings just to get him to that night. Yet somehow Hsing-te and history itself have kept their freedom, their feeling of choice and drift and life, throughout this remarkable novel. -
A review of The Hunting Gun and Bullfight by
Inoue, Yasushi (2008), Der Tod des Teemeisters, Suhrkamp
[honkaku bō ibun, translated by Ursula Gräfe, not yet translated into English]
Inoue, Yasushi (2006), Das Jagdgewehr, Suhrkamp
[ryōjū, translated by Oskar Benl, translated into English as The Hunting Rifle]
Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro (1977), In Praise of Shadows, Leete’s Island Books
[Translated by T.J. Harper and E.G. Seidensticker]
These are two novellas by one of the most highly regarded Japanese prose writers in the second half of the 20th century. I am completely unread as far as critical writings on Japanese prose are concerned, which is not an understatement, so excuse all and any foolish comments that may be obvious and/or superfluous. The Hunting Rifle is Inoue’s first publication, published in 1949, the Death of a Tea Master’s one of his last publications, published in 1981.
Reading the first one puzzled me inordinately. The Hunting Rifle is a strangely seductive work of art. It is reduced to a few significant pieces of dialogue, a few episodes. I started to read it as a love story, but my expectations, schooled by reading countless works of genre literature, were soon disappointed by the way it was executed: it is not an actual love story, it’s a retelling of a love story at a distance, or rather: it is a story about love, if that makes any sense. The story which forms the framework is about a writer who turns an observation about a middle-aged man with a hunting rifle into a poem, published into a hunter’s magazine; the poem, which is extraordinarily beautiful, closes by saying that the rifle presses all its weight into the back and soul of the lonely man wearing it, and that it’s radiating a blood-specked beauty that never appears when the rifle’s targeting something living. Clearly, the poem is critical of hunting, and consequently the poet is astonished that a hunter’s magazine would print it. Shortly afterwards, a man writes him, sure of being the middle-aged man described in the poem, and sends him three letters, asking the narrator to read and then burn them.
The three letters, which the narrator then ‘presents’ to the reader, tell of a forbidden affair between Saiko and her cousin Joskuke, both of whom are married, an affair, which, as we learn soon, ends with Saiko’s suicide 13 years later. The letters are from Saiko’s daughter, who was handed a journal by her mother just before the mother kills herself, and writes a long letter to “Uncle Josuke”, which becomes more and more condemning. She condemns the affair as amoral and thus demonstrates the constraints of the society which led to the affair being covert and doomed; additionally, her righteous – and partly justified- indignation creates an atmosphere that helps the reader to better place the events which are more fully related by the two other letters. The second letter is from Josuke’s wife, Midori, who tells him, among other things, that she has long known about the affair and asks for a divorce. The third and final letter is written by Saiko, who thanks him for having loved her so much for 13 years, and expresses, at the same time, a deep and devastating loneliness; it is a passionate letter yet very composed and cold.
Between these three letters we find events described that have led to four people being lonely, cold, even when passionately in love. There is a deep yearning for love, for company, in each of these letters, although Saiko’s daughter’s in a different way. They are hunting, for love, for composure, for dignity. In an episode related in Midori’s letter, Josuke aims at her back while both sit on a porch. She says she noticed even though Josuke put the gun away quickly. The chaos and violence of life does not reach these characters, the things they do follow careful, pre-established lines. And Saiko’s suicide is an old, known way to end such an affair before it is troubled by violence; and yes, suicide is not violence, as in The Death of a Tea Master, suicide is shown to be an adult, well-considered decision to endow one’s life with a shape even to the end of it; or rather: especially at the end of it. That illicit affair brought disorder into their lives, even if it was just a little, and Saiko’s final action is shown as an attempt to-re-order it. Inoue finds beauty in the spare and in the darkness in people’s minds.
I was reminded of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s short but breathtakingly beautiful essay “In Praise of Shadows”, which praises traditional Japanese architecture, where simplicity rules. As he makes abundantly clear early on, this simplicity is a superficial one, it may and often does hide complexities, but the surface, inside and outside the houses, is clean and spare. It is not the cleanliness of modern glass-and-steel architecture, it’s an aesthetic that involves changing surfaces like wood, which glitter with age the older a house is. The shadows, which are praised, are those left in a room by the angle of the light falling in. Shadow and darkness are not the absence of light for Tanizaki, they are the most important element. It is in shadows that we can contemplate ourselves best, it is light that disturbs our inner order. Thinking and aesthetic meditation are described as almost incompatible with modern fixtures. This passage may illustrate what I mean:
On the far side of the screen, at the edge of the little circle of light, the darkness seemed to fall from the ceiling, lofty, intense, monolithic, the fragile light of the candle unable to pierce its thickness, turned back as from a black wall. I wonder if my readers know the color of that “darkness seen by candlelight.” It was different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite of myself, as though to keep it out of my eyes.Tanizaki mourns a style long gone, a style that cannot compete with the comfort central heating, electric lights and enamel toilets can provide. He feels an alienation of sorts towards that new world, he considers it a part of Western culture. If we Japanese, he says at one point, had invented these things, they would not be as corrosive to our culture as these Western objects are.
Maybe having read both of these books prepared me well for my second Inoue novella, “Death of a Tea Master”, maybe that’s why it did not irritate nor puzzle me at all. It is a beguiling, melancholy historical story retracing the mystery behind the self-inflicted death of a famous tea master, Sen no Rikyū, which soon turns out to be a meditation on the tea ceremony and those who take part in it. Maybe, however, it was different in the latter novella, since it wears its aesthetic heart on its sleeve, by following up both on the story as well as on the aesthetic background. When I closed its covers I found myself moved, entranced, and saddened. I felt the impulse to prepare a careful cup of tea, which is the strangest effect a book has ever had on me.
The Tea Master is a book that extends over a period of 32 years, from 1590 to 1622. It is a period of turmoil that sees the death of a generation of tea masters who appear to be the guardians of a certain culture, and their passing clearly signifies a change within that culture. The span of time encompasses the last throes of the Sengoku period, a time of upheavals and violent conflicts, which was ended by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a powerful daimyo, as regional warlords were then called. Hideyoshi unified Japan by subjugating the other major clans or by entering into alliances with them. It was Hideyoshi who asked for Rikyū’s suicide by seppuku, the ritual suicide mostly undertaken by the retainers of defeated warlords, either voluntarily or not. This novel, which is supposed to be a modern edition of old, unedited journals of a 17th century monk by the name of Honkakubo, charts this monk’s attempts to find out why Rikyū killed himself. And surprisingly, ‘because Hideyoshi told him to’ is not the answer.
As the Hunting Rifle seemed to be a love story, the Death of the Tea Master appears to be a mystery yet applying our genre expectation to this novel would make for as disappointing a reading experience as did reading the Hunting Rifle as a love story for me. As the plot, which covers 32 years, extends over as little as 167 pages in my edition, there are huge gaps and jumps. Honkakubo does not search for the answer to the mystery, at least not in the world around him. His search does not necessarily involve an interrogation of people and evidence, what McHale, if I remember correctly, refers to as the epistemological quest, which distinguishes the modern from the postmodern. Honkakubo makes use of information if and when it comes and the use he makes of it is singular: as he is handed a document that belonged to the late tea master, asked for his expertise, he finds that the document contains thoughts on the tea ceremony and spends weeks, carefully copying it down, meditating. During the 32 years he is invited by a few other monks and tea masters because he used to be a student of the late Rikyū, and has a few elliptical talks with them about Rikyū and the tea ceremony in general. They are elliptical because Honkakubo is reticent, quiet, polite. Even when among people who may cast light upon the mystery, he does not pursue a line of questioning that may enlight him. These people he meets are far more inquisitive yet they must consider him a dissatisfying conversationalist, because he is reluctant to share his interpretations of events during the last years and months of Rikyū’s life.
Even as more and more facets of the great tea master’s life enter the picture, his death remains a mystery, because outside events cannot shed light on it. Only as Honkakubo immerses himself in meditation, praying at Rikyū’s shrine and contemplating the tea ceremony, he gains an idea of what happened. Generally, asking for someone’s suicide meant killing them as surely as would thrusting the tanto into their bowls with their own bare hands. There is, however, a major difference. It is, after all, a self-inflicted death; in this case, Honkakubo and others are additionally wondering why Rikyū did nothing to alter Hideyoshi’s opinion. As our rulers today, the daimyos of Rikyū’s time were prone to bouts of anger now and then. Asking for a retainer’s suicide apparently was often a rash act, and the retainer was expected to ask for forgiveness and mercy afterwards. Rikyū would, it transpires, almost certainly have been granted mercy. Instead, he went to his death without complaint.
The tea ceremony is offered as a possibility for understanding the reasons for this. Rikyū was one of the first important tea masters to practice the art of wabi-sabi, a philosophy of simplicity, intimacy and modesty. I briefly discussed Tanizaki’s essay on architectural aesthetics earlier and the culture the loss of which he laments, is basically one dominated by wabi-sabi. In one of the most intense scenes in the novella, the tea ceremony is described as an encounter with death, with the tea drinker submitting to the tea master’s power. Although the tea master, who grinds the tea leaves, boils the water, cooks and serves the tea, may seem like a servant, he is actually the one person who is in charge of a ceremony which is apparently of high spiritual importance, because drinking the tea is not important; one has to drink it in the right way. People bow their heads under the yoke of ceremony, of convention and their tea master’s actions. Seppuku, the ritual suicide, is, in a way, quite a similar procedure, only here the warlord or emperor calls the shots. It may be that by refusing to ask for mercy, Rykiyu is refusing his lord the power which seppuku usually grants him.
This, however is but a personal interpretation. The novella itself does not decide upon any single reading. Instead it tries to make the cultural and personal context, in which the novella’s characters move, as clear as possible. It is not asking the reader to follow up on its clues to find out who did it; on the contrary, it invites the reader to meditate upon death and power and may, in some perceptive readers, awake a sense of self which we may be alienated from by modern times. This corresponds to the Hunting Rifle in a curious way. Behind the sad and cold story that is offered to us, love, not necessarily reciprocal love, is presented as a way to awaken your self as well. The Death and the Tea Master never allows for us to construct dichotomies, oppositions, it asks for our thoughts on death and autonomy; similarly, The Hunting Rifle asks us to consider our attitude towards love. Saiko relates an episode from school, where girls in class distribute a sheet of paper with two questions on it: “do you want to be loved” and “do you want to love”. In a way, the book is about the characters’ own hypothetical answers to this question and about the effect this has on their lives. Both of the novellas seem very distant from us, culturally, yet that distance beckons us to step closer. Tanizaki writes, near the end of the essay, and he could well have been describing Inoue’s method:
I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration.- shigekuni.wordpress.com/
Yasushi Inoue, Counterfeiter and Other Stories
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Yasushi Inoue, The Blue Wolf: A Novel of the Life of Chinggis Khan
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Yasushi Inoue, The Samurai Banner of Furin Kazan
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Yasunari Kawabata, Yasushi Inoue, The Izu Dancer and Other Stories: The Counterfeiter, Obasute, The Full Moon
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Inoue Yasushi (1907-1991)
Prolific Japanese novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and poet, whose subject matters ranged from modern Japan to ancient China, but he gained fame with his historical fiction. Inoue began his literary career after reaching middle age. Among his best-known works is Tempyo no iraka (1957, The Roof Tile of Tempyo), set in the 8th-century, and describing the journey of a group of Japanese Buddhist monks in China. Inoue received several awards and was honored as a "Living National Treasure" of Japan.
"He sat on the expanse of grass, cross-legged in contemplation, and old man in a turban. When he opened his eyes I asked him what he prayed for. He said he prayed for freedom all mind, all thought. I asked him then how one might enter these mindless regions. He said you hold the tongue in the center of the mouth, making quite sure its sides touch against nothing." (from 'Old Man in a Turban', trans. Dennis Keene, from Global Voices, 1995)Inoue Yasushi was born in Asahikawa on the northern island of Hokkaido. His father, Hayao, was an army doctor, who was transferred several times. His mother, Yae Inoue, came from a family of doctors in several generations. At the age of six Inoue was sent to his grandmother, a former geisha. He grew up in the family's native village in Shizuoka Prefecture. While in the Numazu Middle School, Inoue started to read poetry. In 1926 Inoue moved to Kanazawa where his parents lived and attended the Fourth Higher School. During this period his trained obsessively at a judo club and wrote poetry. To his family's disappointment, Inoue failed the entrance examination for the medical school at Kyushu Imperial University. His father, who retired from his work, spent his last years in semi-seclusion raising chickens. Inoue was accepted into the University's English department, but he did not pay much attention to his studies. After entering the Kyoto Imperial University, where he studied aesthetics and philosophy, Inoue received his degree in 1936. His thesis dealt with Paul Valéry's poetry.
In 1935 Inoue married Adachi Fumi, whose father was a professor of anthropology. Inoue published some poems and short stories in magazines, but he abandoned his career in literature and became a reporter for the weekly magazine Sande Mainichi in Osaka. After serving as a foot soldier in northern China in 1937-38, Inoue continued in the culture department of the Mainichi newspapers.
After the war Inoue made his breakthrough as a writer in 1949 with two short novels, Ryoju (The Hunting Gun) and Togyu – the latter won in 1950 the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for literature. The Hunting Gun is a love story set in the post-war period. It is told from three points of view in letters written to the male protagonist, Josuke. Shoko, his mistress' daughter, has found her mother Saiko's diary and learns that there are secrets between mothers and daughters; his wife goes through their unhappy marriage, and his mistress reveals her true self before her death. Midori is the unhappy wife of Josuke, the husband-lover. The novel originated from a prose poem, inspired by the relationship between a hunting gun and human loneliness, which Inoue wrote for the magazine The Hunter's Companion. "A large seaman's pipe in his mouth, / A setter running before him in grass, / The man strode up the early winter path of Mount Amagi, / And frost cracked under boot-sole. / The band with five and twenty bullets, / The leather coat, dark brown, / The double-barrelled Churchill – / What made him cold, armed with white, bright steel, / To take the lives of creatures?"
Inoue's serialized samurai novel published in the Sunday Mainichi was filmed in 1952 by Hiroshi Inagaki, starring Toshiro Mifune. Inagaki wrote the sceenplay for the film, Sword for Hire, with Akira Kurosawa. In the story civil war and another woman separate a warrior and his lover, a chambermaid, but eventually they are reunited. Sword for Hire was filmed in black-and-white. When it was shown in the United States, it was paired with an Italian sex comedy. Kurosawa also wrote the screenplay for Asunaro monogatari (1955), directed by Hiromichi Horikawa, and based on Inoue's story. Honkakubo Ibun (1981) inspired Kei Kumai's film Sen no Rikyu – honkakubo ibun (1989). It told of a famous tea master, Sen Rikyu, who was an adviser to warlord Hideyoshi. Twenty-seven years after Rikyo's death his disciple Honkakubo tries to determine, whether the tea master committed suicide by his own volition, or whether he was compelled to commit seppuku by Hideyoshi. The film won the Venice Film Festival's Silver Lion Award.
Inoue moved in 1951 to Tokyo and devoted himself entirely to writing. Inoue visited China in the late 1950s, where later he also travelled several times, and in 1964 he was elected to the Japan Academy of Arts. From 1969 to 1972 he served as chairman of the board of directors for the Japan Literary Association. In 1976 he received the Order of Cultural Merit, the highest honor bestowed by the Japanese government. Following Kawabata Yasunari, Inoue was elected an international vice president of PEN in 1984. Inoue died on January 29, 1991 in Tokyo. His name was frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature.
Inoue's tales are often autobiographical and had an essayish objectivity and calmness. "At first encounter, the potential appeal to Western readers of Inoue's writings may seem somewhat limited," wrote J. Thomas Rimer in A Reader's Guide to Japanese Literature (1999). "While his work is not difficult in terms and style, a certain amount of close attention in needed from readers learning to respond to his celebrated re-creations of life in classical China and early Japan." 'The Counterfeiter,' written in 1951, is a tragedy of a mediocre artist. The story is narrated by a writer who has been asked to compose the biography of a famous artist. "When I was first approached, I had jumped at the opportunity of taking on this arduous task. I was very fond not only of Keigaku's work but also of Keigaku as an individual. Besides, compiling a biography of Keigaku would be more than just writing a history of Kyoto's art circles with him at the core; it would be like writing a history of Japan's art world." He finds out that Keikagu had only a few friends, the most important of them the mysterious Shinozaki. The narrator suspects that Shinozaki was in fact Hosen Hara, who had devoted his life to counterfeiting Keigaku's works. Haunted by the fame of Keigaku, Hosen Hara is not able to pursue his own career in the arts.
In Chronicle of My Mother (1975) Inoue tells without sentimentality about his strained relationship with his father, and his mother's illness (Alzheimer's disease?), when she declines into senility. His father's attempt to reach his son with a simple gesture, shaking hands, ends sadly: '' Just that – two hands gently holding onto each other. Then in the next instant I felt my hand being softly pushed away. It was a sensation similar to the slight jerk of the tip of a fishing rod.'' In his mother's fate the author examines the themes of loss, resignation, and loneliness – she forgets her marriage and husband and sinks into a timeless world of childhood images.
Inoue's historical works include Ro-ran (1959), about the rise and fall of a small state in Central Asia, Tonko (1959), which deals with Buddhist manuscripts hidden in the Tun-huang caves, Aoki okami (1960), a fictional account of the life of Genghis Khan, which was originally published in the cultural journal Bungei shunju in 1959-60, and Futo (1963, Wind and Waves), about the Mongol attacks in the 13th century. Its material was partly based on Inoue's travels in Korea. His visit in the United States produced Wadatsumi (1977), an account of Japanese immigration to America. Seiiki monogarari (1968, Journey Beyond Samarkand) drew on Inoue's experiences in Central Asia. Inoue paid much attention to historical accuracy and frequently consulted with academic historians; for Tun-Huang he sought advice from Fujiara Akira (1911-98), a specialist on manuscipts and for Tempyo no iraka (The Roof Tile of Tempyo) he consulted with Ando Kosei (1900-70). - www.kirjasto.sci.fi/inoue.htm
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